Within a system, multiple patterns of rule combination may interact in complex ways. I present a detailed analysis of Swahili verb inflection in which simple rules, composite rules and aggregated rules all enter into intricate competition, yielding an extravaganza of deviations from canonical morphotactic criteria. At the center of this discussion are three characteristics of Swahili conjugation: (i) the polyfunctionality of verbal concords (in virtue of which the same rule is used to express the noun class of a verb’s subject, that of its pronominal object, or that of a relativized argument), (ii) the expression of negation (by means of three complementary rules), and (iii) the marking of relative verb forms (whose relativized-argument affix participates in an extensive pattern of affix counterposition). The rule-combining approach to morphotactics allows the interacting details of these subsystems to be resolved into two very general types exhibiting an unexpected degree of economy.

In the rule-combining approach to morphotactics, the same rules may compose in more than one way to express more than one content. Strikingly, Murrinhpatha verb inflection allows the same rules to compose in the same linear order but in different binary groupings to express distinct content. As a consequence of this fact, Murrinhpatha verb forms exhibit a systematic pattern of ambiguity, as illustrated by pubamngankungkardungime (loosely, ‘they saw us’), in which the paucal nonsibling female suffix -ngime may relate to the verb’s object (allowing the interpretation ‘those two siblings saw us (paucal nonsibling females)’) or to its subject (allowing the interpretation ‘they (paucal nonsibling females) saw us two siblings’). As I show, this ambiguity follows from the Category Determination Principle, according to which a rule whose morphosyntactic content is ambiguous is disambiguated by the first rule with which it composes. I give a detailed demonstration that Murrinhpatha verb inflection exploits this fact.

In the first sentence of his Harmonics Ptolemy offers a definition of the science to which his work is devoted, and – rather surprisingly – it contains nothing to indicate that Harmonics is concerned, specifically, with matters to do with music. On the contrary, the definition seems to say that it is concerned with sounds of all sorts, insofar as they differ from one another in pitch. We know, of course, that in fact the work does indeed focus almost exclusively on musical issues, but it turns out that Ptolemy does not narrow his perspective in a way that excludes further treatment of non-musical sounds until the closing stages of his fourth chapter. This chapter discusses the way in which he achieves the transition between the broader and narrower fields of investigation, while still holding fast to the definition from which he began.

Thomas Hobbes claims that he set political philosophy on its proper footing for the first time in On the Citizen. We examine the opening argument (1.1-1.2), in which Hobbes seeks to remove and replace the longstanding Aristotelian foundation, that human beings are political animals. Hobbes associates this idea with the view that human society is made possible by “mutual love” and a desire for association for its own sake. We argue that Hobbes is particularly targeting the Nicomachean Ethics on philia (friendship or love) and its role in the polis. One might nonetheless doubt that Hobbes’s arguments were at all successful. Although Hobbes certainly takes pleasure in portraying Aristotle’s views in a maximally absurd light, we show that Hobbes’s argument is more sophisticated than it first appears, and that it brings out genuine difficulties for Aristotle’s view. Finally, we consider Hobbes’s revisitation of the idea of “political animals” in a later section of On the Citizen. What emerges from this discussion is that Hobbes’s disagreement with Aristotle does not only – perhaps, not primarily – concern the nature of human motivation, but rather the essence of politics. The idea of a naturally political animal turns out to be an oxymoron.